by Michael Nava
There was a change in the atmosphere. A moment earlier, the room had been the familiar jumble of walls, windows, light, furniture, and linens that the weariness of illness had made as oppressive as a prison cell. Her body had been weighted down by pain, her senses were dulled, and her mind turned inward. But now, as if she had been jolted awake, the room seemed illuminated by a fresh, auroral light in which every object glowed with sentience. The light entered her, suffused her, and her pain and fatigue melted away. She touched the green brocaded coverlet on the bed and felt each strand of the silk fibers in the cloth, felt the small fingers that had separated the threads from the cocoons and even the wriggling silkworms spinning the threads of the cocoons. Startled, she lifted her hand from the bed. A low thrum filled her ears. It was the sound of her blood moving in her veins. The intensity of her perception was terrifying, for each touch, scent, sound, sight, and even the taste of her own saliva was like a series of doors flying open through which she was falling, faster and faster. She thought she must be going mad. She opened her mouth to call out for her maid, but then the sensation of falling gave way to a deep calm. She touched the coverlet again. She could still sense every strand of activity that had created it—from the unfolding of the leaves of the mulberry bush that fed the silkworms to the wrinkled fingers weaving the brocade on a hand loom—but her fear vanished. In its place she felt awe and then an immense love for everything, from the wriggling worm to the old woman at the loom in a small room in a port city in Belgium.
Everything is one. The thought rose in her mind like a bubble rising to the surface of a stream. Everything is one. As she meditated upon it, she began to understand the doors of her senses flying open, the feeling of falling. The doors were barriers she herself had created as she constructed the rooms of her personality and her life. In my father’s house are many dwellings. Is that what Jesus had meant? Was he speaking not only of heaven but of this life in which each person carved out of the vast, unified reality of existence the little houses of personality they inhabited? She had a vision of children making sand houses at the edge of the sea and of waves gently spilling over and eradicating them. The little sand houses were like the houses of self, and the waves were the fingers of God drawing the sand back into himself. For one moment, God had reclaimed her and blown open the doors of the little house in which she had sealed herself. In that moment she experienced the shattering, unmediated knowledge of God: Everything is one.
She thought of Mary and of Mary’s prayer that had been on her lips when this vision—for she knew that this was a vision—had begun. Mary, a girl, scarcely more than a child, to whom an angel had come. How terrified she must have been, Alicia thought. Had she closed her eyes, thrown herself upon the floor, tried to run away? Even after she had calmed herself, the angel’s message could not have been welcome. For what woman could bear the weight of carrying in her womb the son of God? She must have felt confused, frightened, and overwhelmed by the angel’s words, and yet she had been given the grace to respond, “I am the servant of the Lord.”
“I am the servant of the Lord,” Alicia said.
“Fear no evil, Daughter, for I am with you, always.” The voice that spoke these words was low and sweet, male or female, she could not tell. It poured over her like honey and wrapped her in womb-like warmth. For what seemed both an instant and an eternity, she rose out of her body like a stirring in the air, like the fragrance of a rose, and united with God. The ecstasy was beyond words, thoughts, feelings, beyond any happiness she had ever felt on earth.
When she reluctantly opened her eyes to the familiar room, she experienced the pain of her exile as she never had before. She also knew a moment of evil was coming. Yet she was not afraid because that moment, like every other moment of her life, was only a door, which once opened led to where all doors ultimately led. To home.
In the days following Madero’s funeral, Sarmiento’s anxiety over Alicia’s health distracted him from public events. Still weakened from the effects of cholera, she developed bronchitis. He feared it would turn into pneumonia and in her exhausted state prove fatal. He kept her under virtual quarantine until she began to recover. He remained at her side constantly, treating her, monitoring her condition, and allowing only the briefest visits from her sisters. He bore their resentment with equanimity—they had always seemed a gaggle of clucking hens to him, loud but harmless. It would be weeks, even months, before Alicia regained her full strength, and he was determined to protect her. In this, his mother-in-law was his ally, herding the sisters out of the room when Alicia began to falter, overseeing the details of her diet, even bathing her. He came to appreciate that, in her unsentimental way, the old woman was a devoted mother. José slipped in and out of the room, trying to conceal his obvious anxiety as he sat on the bed beside his mother, threading his fingers into hers, his head against her shoulder. In the evenings, Sarmiento helped Alicia into the drawing room of their apartment, where José played the piano, La Niña read her novels, Sarmiento attacked his stack of newspapers, and Alicia worked at her embroidery. For those precious, lamp-lit hours, life appeared almost normal. At such times, Sarmiento imagined he could follow his cousin’s advice and fade into private life, but then the newspaper headlines recording Huerta’s consolidation of power and the toadying tone of the stories beneath them filled him with rage.
One evening in the drawing room, when it was just the two of them, Sarmiento crushed the newspaper in his hands and tossed it to the floor.
“Miguel, what is it?” Alicia asked, looking up from the pile of José’s discarded clothes she was examining for mending before she sent them to San Francisco Tlalco. She wore a heavy robe over a thick nightgown, and her thin face showed the effects of illness.
“Is the world insane, Alicia, or is it just me?” he replied. “Does no one notice that a murderer governs México? My God, to read the newspapers you would think Madero never existed.”
“Of course you are not insane,” she said. “At times like these, I find it useful to meditate on what the Lord said, ‘The prince of the world is coming, but he has no power over me.’”
He shook his head. “I am amazed you persist in your faith even as the archbishop licks Huerta’s boots.”
“My faith has nothing to do with the archbishop,” she replied.
“I can’t let Madero’s murder pass with a prayer and shrug that the world is an evil place.”
She sighed. “You know how much I admired Don Francisco, and I think he would have understood me better than you, Miguel. What is false does not become true simply because people shout it. What is right does not change because it is inconvenient. Don Victoriano is a murderer. That is the truth whether or not the world acknowledges it.”
Abashed, he said, “I apologize, darling. Yes, that is the truth, but the truth is not self-executing, it would seem.”
She set aside a pair of trousers that needed patching and said, “Then perhaps, Miguel, you should stand up and tell the truth.”
At her remark, his skin prickled with fear and he waited until it passed before he spoke. “There would be consequences,” he said.
She looked up at him. “We can bear them.”
“Alicia, Huerta ordered the murder of the president of the Republic. He would have no qualms about eliminating an obscure senator.”
“You left the city once before, to fight with Don Francisco,” she said. “If you had to, you could leave again to fight Don Victoriano. I would go with you.”
“You have no idea of what you are saying,” he replied. “The hardships, the separation from your family.”
“You are my family, Miguel. As for hardship, if the choice is between hardship in the service of what is right and comfort purchased at the expense of my conscience, there is no choice.” She reached out her hand and folded it in his. “You think I have not been aware of your restlessness, but I am, and I share your horror at what was done to Don Francisco, to México.”
He raised her hand t
o his lips, kissed it, and smiled at her. “I thought Christians turned the other cheek.”
“They also die for their beliefs,” she replied. “And they are not the only ones. Francisco Madero died for his. Leaving the city for a time would be a small price to pay for yours.” She pulled a shirt from the pile of clothes and inspected the collar and the cuffs. “This shirt is too frayed to give away, but the material is so fine, I don’t want to discard it. Perhaps I can cut it up and make a smaller garment from it.” She held it out. “What do you think?”
Later, when he was alone, Sarmiento mulled over his wife’s words. It was not her courage that astonished him—her life was a lesson in courage—but her placid certitude. While he was tormented with anxieties, fears, ambivalence, self-doubt, and self-loathing at his cowardice, Alicia was calmly prepared to leave the life she had always known for an uncertain exile with a man who, once he denounced Huerta, would almost certainly have a price on his head. Now that she had spoken, his path became clear to him. He set about writing what he knew would be the last speech he ever delivered in the Senate chambers.
Sarmiento entered the Café Colón and stood for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the bar. Presidents come and go, he thought with grim amusement as he surveyed the scene before him, but the Colón never changed—the same richly dressed men huddled over the round, marble-topped tables whispering conspiratorially. He saw Damian sitting at a table in the back of the room, not far from where Victoriano Huerta, then a drunken, disgraced general, had pulled a gun on Sarmiento. Now Huerta was president of the Republic and Sarmiento, as he passed among the tables of politicians, high-ranking bureaucrats, and plutocrats, could have been invisible for all the attention they paid him. He remembered what Luis had once told him: “Politicians don’t have permanent friends, only permanent interests.” Even so, the crudeness with which he was dismissed by the men in the bar who had once cultivated him because of his friendship with Madero astounded him. He made his way to his brother-in-law. He had sought out Damian because it had occurred to him that his speech would affect his wife’s entire family and, potentially, their fortunes. He hoped to make them understand why he felt he must speak out. He thought Damian, who had had his own ties to Madero through Gustavo, would be the most sympathetic.
“Miguel,” Damian said, rising.
They embraced and sat. A white-coated waiter came, took their order, and left them to consider each other through the haze of Damian’s cigar, burning in the heavy obsidian ashtray on the table. Sarmiento had not spoken to Damian since his brother-in-law had left the city with the rest of the family before the Ten Tragic Days that had preceded Madero’s fall.
“You look well,” Sarmiento said, and Damian did look as inscrutably handsome as ever. “Alicia tells me that your house was undamaged in the fighting.”
He picked up his cigar and puffed it. “Fortunately. Don Francisco’s house was burned to the ground.”
“Yes, I saw the photographs in the newspapers,” Sarmiento replied. “That had to have been deliberate.”
The waiter brought them their drinks. After he left, Damian said, “Of course it was. You were at the funeral, Miguel.” He smiled at Sarmiento’s unspoken question of how he knew. “I read the newspapers, too. You were photographed.”
“Yes. You were not.” It came out as more of a challenge than Sarmiento had intended.
Damian lifted his drink to his lips, a frothy mix he favored called a Brandy Alexander, and sipped it, leaving a thin line of cream along his moustache. “You blame me?”
“You were friends with Gustavo.” Again, his tone was unintentionally accusatory as if all the anger he felt at those who had abandoned Madero—the roomful of men around them—was seeping out at Damian.
“I did business with Gustavo,” he replied mildly. “If you’ve come to reproach me, Miguel, don’t waste your breath. I am not a politician, much less an idealist like you. I’m a businessman. I adjust to circumstances. You should try it. One sleeps better at night.”
“I have not come to scold you but to tell you,” he dropped his voice, “that I am going to make a speech on the Senate floor denouncing Huerta. I am fully prepared to accept the consequences for myself, but for you, Eulalia, the rest of the family—well, I wanted you to know so you could prepare.”
His brother-in-law lifted his cocktail glass by the stem and turned it in his fingers, thoughtfully. “And you are going to commit suicide when? Because you realize you will be killed.”
“We will leave the city. Alicia, my son, myself. We will go north.”
“To join Governor Carranza’s rebellion?” Damian asked. He sipped his drink. “I’ve met the old man, Miguel. A pompous windbag who would like to be dictator himself. He’s no Madero.”
“There was only one Madero,” Sarmiento replied softly.
“Ah, the legend begins,” Damian said scornfully. “Madero, the martyr of democracy.” He drained his glass and held it up for the waiter to see before setting it on the table. “Your certainties are like those of a child, Miguel, the product of blissful ignorance and misplaced hero worship.” The waiter brought his second drink. “You want to know the truth about Francisco Madero? I will tell you. He was as corrupt as Don Porfirio.”
“That’s slander. I knew Madero and a more honest man never lived.”
“And I knew Gustavo,” Damian retorted. “His brother’s right hand. Gustavo, who doled out government jobs to Madero’s supporters and collected the kickbacks on government contracts for the Madero family. Gustavo, who organized the porra—the band of thugs that threatened opposition politicians and burned one of the opposition newspapers to the ground. You think you’re the only legislator who owes his office to election fraud? That was Gustavo too, but everything Gustavo did, he did with his brother’s knowledge and consent.”
Sarmiento remembered the meeting with Madero and his brother when they proposed his election into the Senate. His face must have shown his discomfort because Damian pressed on relentlessly. “You do know what I am talking about, don’t you, Miguel? How could you not? You voted for Madero’s bill to impose press censorship.”
“It was a temporary measure,” Sarmiento murmured. “The opposition newspapers were attempting to foment a rebellion against the elected government.”
“The road to dictatorship is paved with temporary measures,” Damian replied mockingly.
“Madero was no dictator.”
“Agreed. He was far too inept for that,” Damian said. “Look, Miguel, what did the man really accomplish? He brought down the most stable government México has ever known and replaced it with a weak regime whose days were numbered from the beginning. He gave us Huerta, a drunkard and a murderer.” He waved his cigar. “Don’t look so surprised. The fact that I despised Madero doesn’t mean I admire his assassin. I am simply realistic. Huerta is president now. One has to do business with him. It won’t make life easier if you insist on attacking him in public. I would advise you not to.”
“I did not come to you for advice, Damian, only to warn you.”
“Then I will return the favor,” his brother-in-law said. “If you do this, you will be completely on your own. No one in the family will defend you or assist you. To the contrary, we will denounce you, and if necessary to prove our loyalty to the government, help capture and prosecute you. So whatever your plan of escape is, Miguel, you might wish to keep it to yourself.”
Shocked, he gasped, “You would really do that to me, Damian, to Alicia?”
“My God,” Damian said, his anger breaking through his composure. “Are you Don Quixote? This is not your absurd, chivalrous fantasy of the world, Miguel; this is the actual world, where real people have real things to lose if you persist in your foolishness. I will not risk my family to protect yours.” He smiled humorlessly. “It’s survival of the fittest, not the most virtuous.”
“And if I return to the city with a triumphant Carranza, Damian?” Sarmiento said, with equal ang
er. “What will you say then?”
He shrugged. “All hail the conquering hero.”
The Senate chamber was half-empty and even the senators who were present behaved more like casual acquaintances at a social event—smoking, laughing, aimlessly pacing the thick, burgundy carpet in the well of the chamber—than legislators. It was a very different scene than Sarmiento remembered from the last time he had attended, when Maderista senators and opposition senators hurled invective at each other while the president of the Senate futilely called for order. His entrance into the chamber was met with murmured comments and a few raised eyebrows. None of his colleagues approached him except for Marciano Trejo, the ancient senator from the state of Jalisco. Senator Trejo was a remnant from Don Porfirio’s era, nominally in opposition to Madero, but for all that a kind and gracious man who had known and admired Sarmiento’s father.
“Chico,” he said in his old man’s croak. “Thank God you are safe and well. Although I must say, I am a little surprised to see you here.” He glanced around the room. “The other lambs have all run off, leaving only us wolves.”
Sarmiento, too, had observed that the only senators present were those who had opposed Madero. “Has it been like this since … the change in government?”
Trejo shrugged. “At first a few of your lot showed up and made speeches against Huerta, but after soldiers were sent to fill the gallery, discretion became the better part of valor. Why are you here, Miguel?”
“I too have a speech to make.”
The old man frowned. “Unless you have converted to our side, that is not a good idea. Belisario Domínguez was the last senator to denounce Huerta and three days later he was beaten to death in his hotel room. By persons unknown, of course.”